Ultimately if a nation-state is after your data then strong encryption is your best bet. You can’t rely on any device-specific protections: Even if you had some system in place that prevents people from copying the data off a device without inputting a password, someone can just open it up, unsolder the NAND flash chips (or whatever else it uses) and read out their contents. The only thing you can reasonably do is make sure that your encrypted data can’t be brute forced easily.

I have three partitions: First one is Ventoy with a couple of distros per architecture. Partition two is a standard exfat partition for files. Partition three is a small fat16 partition, since there’s always that one device someone has (oscilloscope, 3D printer, UEFI/BIOS, etc.) that only supports very simple file systems. I’ve had to use the fat16 partition more than a couple of times and I don’t even work with legacy hardware.

Oh I see, that is odd. I thought your background was yellow beforehand. Is it perhaps plasma’s Night Light? That will tint everything yellow when it’s enabled.

New plasma update sets the accent colour from your background. To change it go to System Settings > Colours and Themes > Colours (not sure if Mint has it in the same place) then set the accent colour you like from the top.

Matrix is an open source protocol for federated chatrooms, kind of like if someone mixed Lemmy with Discord and Signal. You make an account with a Matrix ‘homeserver’ (can be your own self-hosted server) just like Lemmy, so you’ll have a username like user@homeserver.com. Once you do you can join any number of Spaces, akin to Discord servers. Unlike Discord, these servers will be hosted on the homeserver which means they can be self-hosted, and often come with strong safety guarantees like end-to-end encryption or the double ratchet algorithm as seen in Signal (depending on how the homeserver is configured). Matrix is really just a protocol, so there are a bunch of chat clients that implement it, the first-party client is called Element, but there are many to choose from.

I would argue the main reason to use Matrix over Slack or Discord is much the same reason you’d use Signal over Whatsapp - data privacy. Because you can self-host the homeserver any spaces you make can be hosted on your local machine. For those who are privacy advocates that’s a very good reason to use Matrix over most other solutions. If you’re a company or a concerned individual that routinely deals with data that really shouldn’t be on the ‘cloud’ (e.g. trade secrets, materials under NDA, personal information, etc.) then Matrix seems like a better fit than say Slack, provided you self-host. Discord has been under fire for their privacy policy for end users, so you might consider Matrix as a replacement for Discord too.

Torvalds just really dislikes C++. He’s gone on the record saying that he thinks it’s just not a good language. In his own words “C++ is just a waste, there is no design at all, just adding some scum on top of C.”

There’s a whole bunch of mechanisms, largely depending on the fusion architecture and the atoms being fused. For tokamak reactors the circular nature lends itself well to what you describe, though usually it’s energy being imparted into the ions to keep them contained and away from the walls. In the ‘standard’ deuterium-tritium fusion model (the easiest to perform) fusion produces a helium nucleus and a neutron, where the neutron gets most of the energy. Since a neutron can’t be contained by magnets it impacts the chamber walls. This heat is wicked away by, you guessed it, cooling water which turns into steam. In order to use a direct energy conversion strategy you need a fusion reaction that produces no neutrons, but we’re not there yet.

Some types of fusion can bypass steam generation and use what’s creatively called Direct Energy Conversion. If the fusion products are charged particles they can be passed through a magnetic field to separate them based on charge and collected onto plates. When you look at the electric potential between the plates you’ve effectively created a voltage, no steam necessary. It’s also theoretically possible to do the same with some types of fission products too.

Because planets are terribly inefficient? Their livable area per mass is very low. You could deconstruct a planet and use the materials to make O’Neill cylinders (or similar) that can comfortably hold many orders of magnitude more people. It’s also very energy expensive to go up and down the gravity well of a planet, increasing the cost of all space-related industry, shipping and transport. For a interplanetary civilisation that’s a huge cost. Artificial habitats have no such problem.

It’s interesting the article focuses so much on Dyson spheres considering they’re probably the least practical megastructure. Dyson swarms are a much more practical and accepted concept, hell it’s one of the things that astrophysicists are actually looking for out there.

As other people have said, oozing. In addition to their fixes I would suggest looking into sequential printing as a print method to be aware of. Rather than printing two objects layer-by-layer, sequential printing will complete all the layers of one object before starting on the next. This has the major benefit that you get zero oozing or stringing between parts. This can be a lifesaver on materials like PETG that will always string to some extent. The only gotcha is that you have to place the parts further apart on the print bed, as the extruder will collide with any nearby completed parts (Prusa slicer has all of this built in, including alerting you if any collisions would occur). I don’t recommend it for every print, but it’s a useful tool to have in your toolbox.